Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power »

James McGrath Morris is the author of The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism, which was selected as a Washington Post Best Book of 2004. He is the editor of the monthly Biographer's Craft, and his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Observer, and the Baltimore Sun.

Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history. Yet, in nineteenth-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media.

James McGrath Morris traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant's rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to fall blind and become a lonely, tormented recluse wandering the globe. But not before Pulitzer transformed American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. As the first media baron to recognize the vast social changes of the industrial revolution, he harnessed all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics, and made the newspaper an essential feature of urban life. Pulitzer used his influence to advance a progressive political agenda and his power to fight those who opposed him. The course he followed led him to battle Theodore Roosevelt who, when President, tried to send Pulitzer to prison. The grueling legal battles Pulitzer endured for freedom of the press changed the landscape of American newspapers and politics.

Based on years of research and newly discovered documents, Pulitzer is a classic, magisterial biography and a gripping portrait of an American icon.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

…[an] excellent book: a thorough, possibly definitive biography of the man who shaped the modern newspaper more than anyone else…There have been other biographies of Pulitzer, most notably W.A. Swanberg's published in 1967, but James McGrath Morris's is the best. It is authoritative, lucid and fair to its complicated subject, and it draws upon a certain amount of "items previously unavailable to other biographers," most notably an unpublished memoir by Pulitzer's younger brother, Albert, and love letters to Pulitzer's wife, Kate, from a noted journalist with whom she had a brief but apparently passionate affair. The first of these tells us a bit more about Pulitzer's boyhood, and the second simply adds a bit of juice to his story.

Prologue: Havana 1909 1

Pt. I 1847-1878

1 Hungary 9

2 Boots and Saddles 20

3 The Promised Land 29

4 Politics and Journalism 43

5 Politics and Gunpowder 56

6 Left Behind 70

7 Politics and Rebellion 80

8 Politics and Principle 95

9 Founding Father 111

10 Fraud and His Fraudulency 124

11 Nannie and Kate 138

Pt. II 1878-1888

12 A Paper of His Own 149

13 Success 162

14 Dark Lantern 175

15 St. Louis Grows Small 190

16 The Great Theater 204

17 Kingmaker 221

18 Raising Liberty 233

19 A Blind Croesus 248

Pt. III 1888-1911

20 Samson Agonistes 269

21 Darkness 284

22 Caged Eagle 299

23 Trouble from the West 319

24 Yellow 337

25 The Great God Success 349

26 Fleeing His Shadow 361

27 Captured for the Ages 383

28 Forever Unsatisfied 399

29 Clash of Titans 417

30 A Short Remaining Span 441

31 Softly, Very Softly 456

Acknowledgments 465

Notes 471

Bibliography 531

Index 537